Sunday: Hili dialogue

25 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

1. Here’s an amusing video on Twitter where the “Queers for Palestine” activist is perplexed by the reality of Islam.

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2. Those images of dead Palestinians attempting to flee to the south of Gaza speak volumes regarding what Hamas will do to save itself. Hamas must be destroyed for the good of all humanity.

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   1. Also, if you want to see details regarding the Israeli victims of Hamas, visit the Oct7Map web site: https://oct7map.com/. It illustrates on a map of Israel and Gaza where each Israeli victim was killed on October 7 and provides a brief bio of each. (The site didn’t work correctly in iPad last week, but it now seems to be working correctly.)

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   2. Agreed. According to the Torygraph:

      Hamas delayed the evacuation of wounded Palestinian civilians from Gaza by placing its own fighters on border departure lists.

      A senior official in Joe Biden’s administration said Hamas had repeatedly provided Israel, the United States and Egypt with lists of Palestinians who were wounded and should be allowed to depart – only for it to later emerge during security checks that many of those included were Hamas fighters.

      “About a third of the wounded Palestinians on the first lists were Hamas fighters,” reported The New York Times.

      The inclusion of the fighters was not acceptable, said the official, resulting in delays to the evacuation which only started this earlier week – more than three weeks into the war.

      https://archive.ph/GBkk0

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      1. “About a third of the wounded Palestinians on the first lists were Hamas fighters.” (NY Times)

         Exhaust the hypothesis space:
         1) Hamas is triaging its own wounded combatants to the front of the line, “enriching” the evacuation queue with their people at the expense of civilians, hoping to re-infiltrate them if they recover fighting ability;
         2) The wounded “civilians” in Gaza are in fact one-third armed Hamas combatants to begin with. Recall that a teenager of 15-16 wearing a green scarf and shot while becoming proficient at using an assault rifle will still be classified among “children” in looking at casualty figures. Since the UN would never accuse Hamas of using child soldiers, by definition a killed or wounded “child” must be a civilian non-combatant /sarc;
         3) The wounded “civilians” are some proportion greater than one-third Hamas fighters, including those not known to Israeli authorities to have been armed combatants at the time they were injured;
         4) Hamas is deliberately trying to frustrate the evacuation process by salting the queue with its wounded (and therefore useless) combatants, knowing that the Israelis will shut the evacuation down, keeping bona fidecivilians firmly in place to do their job as human shields;
         5), 6), 7), ………

         More than one of these can be true.

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3. On this day:
   1499 – The Catholicon, written in 1464 by Jehan Lagadeuc in Tréguier, is published; this is the first Breton dictionary as well as the first French dictionary.

   1605 – Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes is arrested in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, where he had planted gunpowder in an attempt to blow up the building and kill King James I of England.

   1872 – Women’s suffrage in the United States: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.

   1895 – George B. Selden is granted the first U.S. patent for an automobile.

   1916 – The Kingdom of Poland is proclaimed by the Act of 5th November of the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

   1916 – The Everett massacre takes place in Everett, Washington as political differences lead to a shoot-out between the Industrial Workers of the World organizers and local police.

   1917 – Lenin calls for the October Revolution.

   1925 – Secret agent Sidney Reilly, the first “super-spy” of the 20th century, is executed by the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union.

   1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt is the first and only President of the United States to be elected to a third term.

   1955 – After being destroyed in World War II, the rebuilt Vienna State Opera reopens with a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

   1956 – Suez Crisis: British and French paratroopers land in Egypt after a week-long bombing campaign.

   1968 – Richard Nixon is elected as 37th President of the United States.

   1995 – André Dallaire attempts to assassinate Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada. He is thwarted when the Prime Minister’s wife locks the door.

   2006 – Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, and his co-defendants Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, are sentenced to death in the al-Dujail trial for their roles in the 1982 massacre of 148 Shia Muslims.

   2007 – China’s first lunar satellite, Chang’e 1, goes into orbit around the Moon.

   2007 – The Android mobile operating system is unveiled by Google.

   2009 – U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan murders 13 and wounds 32 at Fort Hood, Texas in the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. military installation.

   2013 – India launches the Mars Orbiter Mission, its first interplanetary probe.

   Births:
   1607 – Anna Maria van Schurman, Dutch painter (d. 1678). [A highly educated woman, who excelled in art, music, and literature, and became a polyglot proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, and Ethiopic, as well as various contemporary European languages. She was the first woman to unofficially study at a Dutch university.]

   1887 – Paul Wittgenstein, Austrian-American pianist and educator (d. 1961). [Notable for commissioning new piano concerti for the left hand alone, following the amputation of his right arm during the First World War. He devised novel techniques, including pedal and hand-movement combinations, that allowed him to play chords previously regarded as impossible for a five-fingered pianist.]

   1892 – J. B. S. Haldane, English-Indian geneticist and biologist (d. 1964). [With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field, he taught biology at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Institution, and University College London. Renouncing his British citizenship, he became an Indian citizen in 1961 and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute for the rest of his life. 1961. Arthur C. Clarke credited him as “perhaps the most brilliant science populariser of his generation”. Brazilian-British biologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar called Haldane “the cleverest man I ever knew”. According to Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Haldane was always recognized as a singular case”; Ernst Mayr described him as a “polymath”; Michael J. D. White described him as “the most erudite biologist of his generation, and perhaps of the century”; James Watson described him as “England’s most clever and eccentric biologist” and Sahotra Sarkar described him as “probably the most prescient biologist of this [20th] century.”]

   1900 – Ethelwynn Trewavas, British ichthyologist, over a dozen fish species named in her honor (d. 1993).

   1911 – Roy Rogers, American singer, guitarist and actor (d. 1998).

   1913 – Vivien Leigh, Indian-British actress (d. 1967).

   1917 – Jacqueline Auriol, French pilot (d. 2000). [The first women to break the sound barrier, she set five world speed records in the 1950s and 1960s.]

   1931 – Ike Turner, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer (d. 2007).

   1935 – Lester Piggott, English flat racing jockey and trainer (d. 2022).

   1940 – Elke Sommer, German actress.

   1941 – Art Garfunkel, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

   1943 – Sam Shepard, American playwright and actor (d. 2017).

   1946 – Gram Parsons, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1973).

   1947 – Peter Noone, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

   1948 – Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher and author.

   1959 – Bryan Adams, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and actor.

   1963 – Tatum O’Neal, American actress and author.

   1971 – Jonny Greenwood, English guitarist and songwriter.

   1974 – Ryan Adams, American singer-songwriter and guitarist. [I hadn’t realised that Bryan and Ryan Adams shared a birthday.]

   1976 – Mr. Fastfinger, Finnish guitarist and songwriter.

   I thought of all that worked dark pits
   Of war, and died
   Digging the rock where Death reputes
   Peace lies indeed.
   1515 – Mariotto Albertinelli, Italian painter and educator (b. 1474).

   1807 – Angelica Kauffman, painter (b. 1741).

   1879 – James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist and mathematician (b. 1831).

   1942 – George M. Cohan, American actor, singer, composer, author and theatre manager/owner (b. 1878).

   1950 – Mary Harris Armor, American suffragist (b. 1863).

   1956 – Art Tatum, American pianist and composer (b. 1909).

   1960 – Johnny Horton, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1925).

   1960 – Mack Sennett, Canadian-American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1880).

   1964 – Buddy Cole, American pianist and conductor (b. 1916).

   1975 – Edward Lawrie Tatum, American geneticist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1909). [That’s the third time that the name Tatum has appeared in today’s lists!]

   1977 – Alexey Stakhanov, Russian-Soviet miner, the Stakhanovite movement has been named after him (b. 1906).

   1979 – Al Capp, American cartoonist (b. 1909).

   1987 – Eamonn Andrews, Irish radio and television host (b. 1922).

   1989 – Vladimir Horowitz, Ukrainian-American pianist and composer (b. 1903).

   1991 – Robert Maxwell, Czech-English captain, publisher, and politician (b. 1923).

   1997 – Isaiah Berlin, Latvian-English historian, author, and academic (b. 1909).

   2001 – Roy Boulting, English director and producer (b. 1913).

   2005 – John Fowles, English novelist (b. 1926).

   2005 – Link Wray, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1929).

   2015 – Hans Mommsen, German historian and academic (b. 1930). [He was also born on this day.]

   2020 – Geoffrey Palmer, English actor (b. 1927).

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   1. Thanks for the Dallaire shout-out. From the wiki page, he “viewed himself as a ‘secret agent’ avenging the loss of sovereigntist forces in the 1995 Quebec referendum, and that he believed killing the Prime Minister would cause him to ‘become a hero for the nation'”.

      The referendum was an amazing bit of direct democracy: almost 95% voter turnout, over 5 million votes, and a difference of ~55,000 between “No” and “Yes”. About as substantial as the bedroom door that prevented him from killing the Crétiens.

      Two near misses in less than a week.

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      1. Aline Chretien figured in a rare political joke featuring a politician’s family. Her husband, le p’tit gar from Shawinigan, spoke heavily accented French and English and was famous for being equally unintelligible in both official languages as noted by columnist Allan Fotheringham. No slouch himself, he once throttled a demonstrator who was getting in his face, much to the consternation of his RCMP protection detail.

         The story goes that at some tedious rubber-chicken government publicity event in a remote Canadian backwater, Ms. Chretien showed up wearing a hat made of fox fur that didn’t look so good on her. Her husband asked her why she had chosen the hat. She replied, “But Jean, mon chéri, that’s what you suggested.”

         “I did?”

         “Yes, when I asked you what I should wear to visit the good people of Tabusintac*, you said, ‘Tabusintac? Wher’ de fock’s ‘at?'”
         —————-
         * a real place. My mother was born there.

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         1. “Wear the fox hat.” Classic. I miss the days when Our Natural Governing Party was led by loveable rogues and not by cynical woke apparatchiks. Jean is crooked as a dog’s hind leg but he’s a patriot and that makes up for a lot.

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   2. “Reilly: Ace of Spies,” one of my favorite TV series and one that redeems the medium from all the crap seen over it.

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4. With regard to LGBT support for Hamas/Palestine, and their seeming ignorance of the actual feeling towards themselves, I think there are two answers. First, some do know it and aren’t concerned because they will never go there, but are trying to push instability in pursuit of the revolution. Second, they may be truly ignorant. For years MSM have ignored Islamic attitudes and actions towards gays, just as they about women. Of course, a lot of MSM seems in favor of the revolution, too, so I doubt we’ll see much change.

   Also, as a side note, it sounds like Hamas is following Goebbels practice of multiplying casualties by ten.

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5. The mention of Botany Pond in the video of red sliders reminded me that we haven’t had an update about the progress in restoring Botany Pond for a long time (unless I somehow missed it). Is it going to be ready for a new generation of ducklings this spring? I hope so!

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   1. No, I don’t think so. They are very slow, keep encountering “difficulties,” and probably won’t fill the pond with water until June or July next year. That’s a bit late for a good duckling season, and there won’t be food in the pond for ducks then. We are all disappointed.

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      1. Oh rats. I’m sorry to hear that.

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6. If Tlaib doesn’t want to vote for Biden she can vote for trump. With her help (and people like her) he probably will get a second term.

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   1. I don’t watch tv news or listen to NPR so I need a pronunciation guide: is it “tuh-lay-ihb” to “tah-leeb” or “tah-layb”? Or something else? Thanks…

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      1. Wikipedia says it’s tuhLEEB.

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         1. ty!

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7. It’s amazing that Panama can get all of its citizens in for a colonoscopy on the same day. Are there long lines at the clinics?

   I may have posted this before, but there was a MLB pitcher named Bartolo Colón. We used to make up imaginary headlines using his name, not unlike the puerile use of Uranus. Our favorite fake headline we came up with during the baseball doping scandals was “Steroid Probe Fingers Colon.”

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   1. The probers must have had long fingers.
      Nice one. If you posted it before, I didn’t see it. So thanks from this corner of the peanut gallery.

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   2. “A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4
      On Chapman’s Homer, thumbtacked to the door.”

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8. “It amazes me that gay people, transpeople, and nonbinary people celebrate a country where any deviation from the “cis” sexual norms is demonized. ”

   I have been watching this process for some time, and I think it is really revolutionary Marxism in action. You might start out as a feminist or an advocate for gay rights, but the movements themselves have been taken over by reds. Then, the logical goals of the movement you identify with are de-prioritized, and disruption and revolution become the goals.
   From the outside, people marching for positions that directly conflict with their identity seems almost comical. History is full of examples of easily manipulated people who have been convinced to become fervent activists against their own best interests.

   Teachers who insist on providing sexual material to little kids, feminists who defend “diverse” child rapists. Gay people marching to support those who would give them flying lessons. It is not rational behavior, and unlikely to be changed except in the case of a profound personal epiphany. A person is concerned about some injustice, joins a movement with good intentions, and might only come to their senses when they realize that they just spent the day shooting people in the head and pushing them into a mass grave.
   A lot of them never have that epiphany. They convince themselves that they did what was necessary, or that they had no choice. Or they just convince themselves that it never happened.

   My opinions on the broader subject here were shaped when I was a student, and interviewed people who were victims, witnesses, or perpetrators of some of the worst horrors of the 1940s. Their motivations and later reflections on their actions were not the subject of the interviews, but it was an interesting issue to me, even without specific expertise on the subject. The Hamas savages, the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, the Khmer Rouge, all started out as normal people.

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   1. “Teachers who insist on providing sexual material to little kids”
      Tucker says what?

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9. I’m not a fan of Ben Shapiro, but the questions from these students were so obtuse that he mopped the floor with them. I would have expected more from students from such a high caliber university, but many of them showed indications of being brainwashed and living in an information echo-chamber with regard to this topic. Some of them were barely able to suppress their obvious hatred of Jews.

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10. It turns out that it was the skunk who taught the dog that two of the greatest qualities of life are patience and wisdom. Skunks are excellent teachers while dogs are exceptional students.

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